Finning: Slaughtering sharks, poisoning people.
- Photo by Aaron Gekoski
Sharks get a bad press, so bad that the fact that 100 million sharks are killed every year, that’s a 110,000 every hour, and a third of species are facing extinction is met with little international outrage.
Many sharks are killed as a by-catch of commercial fisheries using long line nets, however, it’s the increasing demand for shark fin soup,considered a delicacy in China and other parts of Asia, that has ensured that we’ve lost an estimated 90% of our sharks in the last 50 years.
It’s estimated that around 70 million sharks a year are killed for the practice known as ‘finning’, whereby their dorsal fins are sliced off, into the sea where the shark dies, slowly.
Over recent years, Mozambique’s waters have become a haven for shark fishermen, devastating shark populations, but also inadvertently, shark finning is poisoning local communities. This feature on finning appears in this months New Internationalist.
